Search For Free Downloads Of 'The Interview' Shows How Pointless The MPAA's Anti-Google Strategy Really Is

from the google-is-not-going-to-block-yahoo-and-linkedin dept

A few weeks ago, we wrote about how bizarre it was that the MPAA was so focused on attacking Google and forcing it to take entire sites out of its index when it didn’t seem to understand these issues in the slightest. As a part of that, we highlighted how pointless the plan was, because if you looked for a domain after it was removed (which we mocked up by using the “-” modifier), you just ended up getting other people telling you how to get the same kind of content anyway. And yet, the MPAA keeps pushing for Google to further push down or delete entire sites. And, of course, Google continues to give in anyway, giving the industry what it wants. A few months ago it ratcheted up the demotion-for-DMCA-notices aspect of its algorithm, and a bunch of sites have effectively disappeared.

But does it really make a difference? As we discussed, one immediate result of this was that people who were searching for free downloads often came across more sketchy sites (which, perhaps, the MPAA doesn’t much care about). But, it’s also having a secondary effect — which is that it’s showing how perfectly legitimate websites are also being used to tell people how to access content for free (usually in unauthorized ways).

Take, for example, a Google search for someone who wanted to watch The Interview for free. While many, many people paid to see the film through official channels, lots of others went for the unauthorized versions. But if you do a search on Google, where most sketchy sites have been downvoted, you start to see some interesting things:

If you can’t see it, you’ll note that many of the links to free (and most likely unauthorized) versions are from well established sites. The top one is to Facebook. The third slot is Linkedin. Towards the bottom is Tumblr. It’s very likely that all these links going to infringing/unauthorized copies of the film. Yet they’re on popular sites — the kinds of sites that Google isn’t going to suddenly remove from search or seriously downrank due to DMCA notices because — and, on this, hopefully everyone can agree — there’s an awful lot of perfectly legitimate content on sites like those.

This isn’t, of course, to point out how to access that movie for free, but to highlight, yet again, just how completely pointless the MPAA’s preferred course of action is. It’s as if no one at the MPAA has ever played chess and realized that thinking more than one move ahead might help. Each time the MPAA demands something silly and pointless, it doesn’t help because what Google is doing is not “leading people to piracy.” It’s leading people to what they’re looking for. And if what the people are looking for happens to be free copies of movies, then that’s what they’re going to find eventually. The way to solve that is not to stupidly go after Google and demand it downrank certain sites (which just means others will replace them), but to better offer people what they want from authorized sources so that when people go looking, the content creators and/or copyright holders are the ones who get the benefit.

In other words, just as we’ve been saying for over a decade, the proper response is to innovate, rather than to sit around and blame everyone else for not protecting your obsolete business model.

Filed Under: copyright, innovation, movies, piracy, search, the interview
Companies: google, mpaa